My point: In most cases current residents do not have a tie to the original culture or history.
Do not take my comments out of context. You're making my argument but acting like current residents have more credibility - they don't. They are not the "artifacts" and living through race riots does not have any relevance whatsoever.
In my neighborhood "gentrifiers" are coming and preserving 1890s brownstones, on which a new facade costs upwards of 300k (yes hundreds of thousands). Maintaining our architectural history is not cheap and I think it's great that it's happening.
I think you would be hard-pressed to make your same argument in other neighborhoods:
Bed-Stuy? Crown Heights? Park Slope? Brooklyn heights? Boerum Hill? Clinton hill?
There were 1960s race riots in Bed-Stuy too.
In these places in prime Brooklyn what happened in the 1960s is divorced from the neighborhood's origins. Taking one unique case in Harlem and extrapolating it to gentrification all over NYC does not hold water. From my personal experience, it seems Harlem has seen the least amount of gentrification compared to these Brooklyn neighborhoods. If you were to take real-estate prices as a metric (you could choose others I'm sure), Brooklyn has far outpaced Harlem in the rate of change, especially in the last decade.
Do not take my comments out of context. You're making my argument but acting like current residents have more credibility - they don't. They are not the "artifacts" and living through race riots does not have any relevance whatsoever.
In my neighborhood "gentrifiers" are coming and preserving 1890s brownstones, on which a new facade costs upwards of 300k (yes hundreds of thousands). Maintaining our architectural history is not cheap and I think it's great that it's happening.
I find your position absurd.